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research
Pixels are real and existing matter, when you open an image on screen, the data in the pixels become ‘alive’ for that period of time, for the purpose of showing that very image. In this way, I feel viewing a digital image means to breathe life into it. Everytime I double click and open that image, or video, I awaken its digital cells into action.
A photo of a deceased loved one can illuminate your screen whenever you choose, showing their face for a moment of time again, taking up real and digital space within your screen. We house our files in documents, folders, archives, presentations, videos and online spaces, but often don't think about these locations as their final destinations or the picture itself as their last freeze frame in time.
In my work, I often use found or archival footage of myself and others. I re-appropriate this content into my own work, sometimes altering it, sometimes using it as it is. This process led me to question how I was re-contextualizing some of the material I gathered; videos of women crying over their injured children, men being shot during revolutions, and in general, quite often; people suffering.
I started to wonder if I wanted to imprison these people in my work, as they were in despair, crying or yelling, forever. Who were these people? What has happened to them since? How can I set them free of the misery they express in the found footage I had collected?
My research question is highly inspired by the text “Venus in Two Acts” by Saidiya Hartman. Two quotes from the text which I feel perfectly summarize the approach to re-appropriating archive/secondhand footage with gentleness in my work go as follows:
*| “But I want to say more than this. I want to do more than recount the violence that deposited these traces in the archive. I want to tell a story about two girls capable of retrieving what remains dormant—the purchase or claim of their lives on the present—without committing further violence in my own act of narration.”*
*| “How does one revisit the scene of subjection without replicating the grammar of violence?”2 How can I create a safe landing for the images and videos of people I find in archives, without further perpetuating their captured state of suffering? How can I liberate these unknown faces of their immortal positions in scenes of stress. “Loss gives rise to longing, and in these circumstances, it would not be far-fetched to consider stories as a form of compensation or even as reparations, perhaps the only kind we will ever receive.”*